AMD Hopes Blades Will Slice Into Intel

HP, Sun and IBM look to be critical partners once the dual-core Opteron chips ship.

AMD is sharpening its dual-core chips for blade
servers in hopes of hacking away at Intel's majority market share.

Ben Williams, vice president of servers and workstations at AMD, said
the company may have only 5 percent of the server industry in its pocket
now, but that may change once HP, IBM, and Sun Microsystems begin shipping next-generation
blade servers powered by AMD's dual-core 64-bit Opteron processors.

The long-awaited chip is expected later this year -- long before
Intel's dual-core Xeon processors hit the market in 2006. The dual-core
Opteron is expected to increase performance over AMD's fastest chip, the 2.6GHz Opteron, because both cores will run at 1.8GHz. In addition to speed bumps, Williams said the dual-core chips take advantage of AMD's HyperTransport technology and Direct Connect architecture.

"What this does is create an opportunity for the blade markets, as you
can have one core crunching numbers while the other one is handling a
security problem or a firmware update," Williams told internetnews.com.

Dell remains the only major vendor that has not
announced plans for AMD products.

HP BladeSystem servers are powered by one, two, or four Intel Xeon or
AMD Opteron processors for either Windows or Linux environments. Steve
Cumings, a group manager for HP's ProLiant and Opteron systems, said the
company likes having both processor families available. HP's Opteron
blade products include the recently introduced BL25p and half-height
BL35p. Both are strong sellers, he said.

"We are the leader in the market when it comes to selling x86-based
servers," Cumings told internetnews.com. "As soon as the
dual-core processors are shipping, HP will include them in our product
line. Eventually, we will transfer the entire blade family to dual-core,
because it has huge potential for customers looking to get more
computing power with less wattage."

Recently, HP has been supplementing its corporate accounts with an
increased focus on small to medium-sized businesses. As part of the Blades for
Business program, which will launch on May 2, HP will offer a new 1U
power supply for single HP BladeSystem enclosures designed especially
for smaller implementations. Williams said AMD expects to be at the
forefront of HP's SMB blade plans as well.

Sun, which sells a massive amount of volume servers based on Opteron,
has said that it is developing a broad portfolio based on AMD products,
from eight-way servers to blades. Sun Co-founder and Chief Architect Andy
Bechtolsheim is reportedly behind blade development for the Galaxy project, Sun's
next-generation server architecture.

Blade computing is clearly on the rise and very popular among ISPs
and ASPs for applications such as e-mail, Web hosting and domain name
serving. Analyst firm IDC recently forecast the market to reach $3.7
billion in revenue by 2006 and $6 billion by 2007.

Also in its favor, AMD has an installed base with telecommunications and financial services providers, which have been snatching up Opteron blades en masse.

"These guys are seeing advantages in one hundredth of a tenth of a
second," Williams said. "If they even think they can provide services
that much faster than their competition, they will go with that
product."

But one thing Williams said AMD is trying to avoid is becoming a
niche player. That is why the upcoming dual-core processors have the
same pin count as the single-core processors. The executive points out
that this has been a huge benefit for companies like Angstrom Micro,
Rackable Systems, and Egenera, which Williams said was a company
offering only Intel products until this past February.

"Having the same pin count has been historically huge in the
infrastructure," Williams said. "We allow manufacturers to drop in
single-core and dual-core processors, and all you need is an upgrade to
the BIOS firmware. You don't need different chipsets, and you don't need
to update the drivers."

Williams said AMD is also working on management software to help
organize applications and systems running on those racks of blades

He said AMD will be entertaining hardware reviewers next week
to educate them on AMD's next-generation virtualization technology,
code-named Pacifica. The technology is scheduled to arrive in processors
in 2006, later than Intel's Virtualization Technology. AMD did not say
whether or not the two technologies would be compatible.

In a 2004 IDC report, analysts predicted system management software
will play a key role in moving blades into enterprise data centers.

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